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3y EDWIN WILEY 



?^^";.6 



THE OPTIMISM OF 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 



By Edwin Wiley 




T HERE seems something pecu- 
liarly significant in the coming 
of Robert Louis Stevenson to 
California, for there are many 
things here that could not but 
find their spiritual response in 
a nature constituted like his. 
Life to him was a divine adventure, and 
he yearned for spaces more open and far- 
reaching than the heaths and uplands of 
his Scotland; for stretches of ocean more 
infinite and mysterious than the North 
Sea; islands more distant, lovely and 
strangely-peopled than the Orkneys or 
the Hebrides. Here, on the coast of the 
Pacific, he found a measure of satisfac- 
tion for those longings; he found nature 
in its largest and freest utterance, and a 
people whose souls, like his, were fired 
with an inextinguishable optimism. The 
quality of divine hopefulness, of denial 
of limitations, was with him an attitude 
of mind so "fixed and constant" that 
never, save perhaps in Pulvis et Umbra, 
did he voice the other mood. How much 
of this spirit was due to inheritance, we 
know not ; yet this we do know, that in his 
veins ran the blood of indomitable men. 



Delivered Be/ore the Stevenson Fellowship 
San Francisco, California 



men who linked culture with efficiency, 
the dream ^Wth its fulfilment — builders 
of lighthouses and docks for mighty ships. 
He, too, was a light-bringer and dreamer 
of dreams. Indeed, the dream, with him, 
was the most of life. 

The casual person, thrilled by Prince 
Otto or The New Arabian Nights, might 
think him an Epicurean, but the one who 
knows the toil that perfected his exquisite 
style, knows the man who labored so 
patiently "under the very dart of death," 
would rather call him a stoic. Yet, in 
truth, he was neither. He was more 
keenly alive to physical pain than less 
sensitive beings, but he had the vision of 
the sage and perceived that life had mean- 
ings and implications wider and deeper 
than the pangs of a distempered body, 
even the threat of death itself. "He had 
fiddled so long on the side of the volcano 
that he had forgotten the tune." It was 
a poor sort of cheerfulness, he thought, 
that flourished only in bonny days, that 
which survived the dour ones was more 
heroic stuff. There is an old English 
poem called The Dialogue Between the 
Body and the Soul, in which the soul 
chides the body for leading it astray. But 
the body of R. L. S., much as it obtruded 
itself upon his attention, never made his 
soul its victim ; indeed, he treated that body 
as something over which to gain victories 
of the spirit. The fable goes that Socrates, 
upon being asked why he did not divorce 



Xanthippe, replied: "Ah, never! She is 
my salvation; it was she that made a 
philosopher of me." It was Stevenson's 
body, perhaps, that made of him a story- 
teller and a poet. Who knows, but that 
otherwise, he might have built strong and 
serviceable towers to light the way of 
ships by perilous shores, and a greater 
world still would have been left darkling. 

No, the light raised by R. L. S. was the 
light of romance; he was a builder much 
needed by an age of bricks and mortar 
and ever-turning wheels. Like Rudel and 
the far-away Princess, he followed ro- 
mance even until he died. And what a 
legacy he has left us ! His books may not 
comprehend all of life, but they do com- 
prehend a fine and generous portion of 
it. With the clairvoyance of genius he 
saw quite through the deeds of men, re- 
vealing to us the good in evil and the evil 
in good. Life, he perceived, was no 
simple affair of plus and minus, of right 
and wrong, but it was an infinite complex 
of tangled skeins, yet colored and re- 
deemed by the threads of beauty, of 
divine hopefulness, of large endeavor. 
Thus it was that he could follow, with 
shaking sides, Villon and Macaire through 
dark alleys and pot-rooms, could wander 
through the wilds of Canada with black- 
hearted James Durie, or could make the 
most outrageous and clap-trap old scoun- 
drel of a pirate the hero (for certainly 



John Silver was the hero) of a book and 
put it over! 

Did he love these gamesters with life, 
these wayward souls that play skittles 
with the most precious of society's or- 
dered decencies? I think he did. After 
all, are they not a part of life as it is now 
constituted, and do not their very devia- 
tions from the norms of society, their rags, 
their tinsel and their oaths, contrast them 
against the blacks and grays and duns of 
the everday? "Better," he says, "to lose 
life like a spendthrift than to waste it like 
a miser. It is better to live and be done 
with it than to die daily in the sick room." 

After all, his men and women are but 
a part of his optimism, his boyish delight 
in just living. For the skulker, the 
whiner, the evader, he had no patience; 
a large scoundrel he might love, but he 
hated a little man. "If your morals make 
you dreary, depend upon it they are 
wrong. I do not say 'give them up,' for 
they may be all you have; but conceal 
them like a vice, lest they should spoil the 
lives of better and simpler people." 















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